Enjoyment was nowhere within reach.
Sarg moved food around his plate and managed little more. Hyderlin drank the wine in long, undignified swallows. She shouldn’t have been thirsty—her body did not work that way—and yet her throat was dry.
When they returned to their room, the palace servants had already prepared the bath. Hyderlin sent the maids away and washed alone.
She checked her hair in the mirror for a long time, worried the dye had begun to fade. If it had, she had brought fresh colouring to apply. Her hair was still dense black—as were her brows and lashes. She exhaled with relief.
She dressed in her indoor clothes, went into the dark garden, was sick into the flower bed with quiet efficiency, then wandered back inside.
“The baby?”
Sarg looked up from the armchair by the fire, where he had been turning the pages of a holy text with no particular urgency.
“Asleep.”
Hyderlin looked into the baby’s crib. Beronis was deeply, peacefully sleeping.
She watched the baby for a moment. An angelic face—but thinking of the child’s mother made Hyderlin’s chest press down with a sudden, inexplicable heaviness. She took a bottle of wine from the shelf and worked the cork free.
“The best thing about staying in the palace is the quality of the wine. Will you have some?”
“Just one glass.”
She poured two generous measures of wine—the deep, rich scent of aged fruit bloomed immediately in the air—and carried one to Sarg at the armchair.
He closed the holy text and set it on the side table. When he reached out to take the glass, the rough edge of his fingers caught briefly against hers and then were gone.
Hyderlin settled herself on the chaise with her legs stretched out.
“What do you make of it?”
“Margarite and Chesa?”
“Yes.”
“…They’re both concealing something.”
Sarg turned the silver cup in his hands.
“Margarite won’t answer directly about why Chesa killed the children or how she came to know about it. Her claim has no foundation.”
Hyderlin swirled the wine gently to let it breathe, and said flatly:
“And my dear little brother made a rather compelling case that the queen is suffering from delusions of persecution.”
Something sharp caught in her throat. She drank the wine in one go. Heat bloomed in her stomach. She pressed her fingers against her forehead and groaned.
“Damn it all. Whose version is true? How is there this much to hide? My own questions about why Chesa framed me are more than enough to fill a lifetime—let alone trying to work out who poisoned the queen and why that led to him cutting me loose…”
“Oh, that.”
Sarg said it with the offhandedness of someone mentioning a detail they had almost forgotten.
“My guess is that Chesa poisoned Margarite himself.”
“What?”
Caught off guard by his naming of the culprit, Hyderlin momentarily forgot to object to the fact that he referred to the king by his given name as if he were a neighbour’s dog.
“If Chesa poisoned Margarite, a number of things that don’t add up suddenly do. He’s the actual perpetrator—so of course he would know that you had nothing to do with it. And by extension, the child in Margarite’s womb at the time—he killed that too.”
Hyderlin raised a hand quickly.
“Wait. Wait. But that makes no sense on its own. He had no reason to poison the queen.”
“To kill the child she was carrying.”
“But why?”
“That’s the question you asked me once, and I asked you back.”
Sarg exhaled.
“You said that a man capable of killing his own elder sister on a whim would be just as capable of killing his own children on one.”
They had come back around to the same knot. Chesa had no reason to do this.
Hyderlin let out a strained noise.
“…Even I thought that answer was too convenient when I said it. The truth is, that’s my second question too. Why specifically me? Why pin it on Countess Biche and have her executed? There was no logic in it—emotionally or politically. Whatever anyone else might say, at the time I was, by any measure, a faithful knight to the crown. There was no cause to discard me like that.”
No matter how many times she turned it over, she could not find the reason Chesa had put her on the scaffold.
She had thought about it alone—over and over—and the more she thought the more tangled it became.
What had she done wrong?
Why had Chesa discarded her in such a brutal, irreversible way?
She would have gladly gone to the blind prophet and paid in gold to have the question answered—but the prophet had been gone for years. The only one who could give her the answer was Chesa.
“Then we need to consider another possibility,” Sarg said.
“Another possibility?”
“Yes. One that could answer all of the whys at once.”
“What is it?”
Sarg said it in a voice gone rough and dry:
“Margarite has simply lost her mind.”
A burning log collapsed into the hearth with a crash. The sound of dry wood catching was very loud in the stillness.
October in Lotsa was bitter cold. Tapestries hung along the stone walls and the hearth was kept burning to warm the air inside. The guest room they had been given was no exception.
Yet Hyderlin felt cold.
She rose and crossed to the fireplace with a poker. Sarg continued:
“It is a theory I have been turning over for a long time. If the incident wasn’t a poisoning at all—if it was an attempt by Margarite to take her own life—?”
Hyderlin looked at the flickering, sinking fire. She pushed the poker through the embers with a mechanical hand and tossed in two logs. The flames reared up.
“If the queen had attempted suicide, it would be a royal scandal. So Chesa reframes it as a poisoning. But for that, he needs a culprit. Someone he can lay the blame on—someone whose death would minimise the damage, and whose death might even comfort Margarite when she woke. Who should he name? Who could he sacrifice at minimal cost, and to maximum effect?”
Hyderlin stared into the fire without blinking.
“Name the Captain of the Guard.”
Sarg watched Hyderlin’s straight back from across the room. The arrogant, self-possessed set of those shoulders he had always known was gone. She looked like a slave carrying a load they hadn’t agreed to bear.
“As you know, Margarite came to blame the Captain of the Guard for a very long time. Perhaps more than she blamed the king himself.”
There were cases, after all, where the person who swung the blow was despised more than the one who gave the order.
“So Chesa sacrifices his own arm, in a manner of speaking—to win back Margarite’s favour. To show her: I would go this far for you. Even cut off part of myself for you.”
Hyderlin had stopped breathing properly. She was listening to every word.
“Margarite wakes. She is not in her right mind from the shock of what she’s done to herself. In that state, the news of the Captain’s execution—the news that Chesa would sacrifice someone like that for her—hits her with enormous force. She is moved. And she decides—perhaps—to love him.”
“…”
“But the damage her body has taken through the suicide attempt makes pregnancy very difficult. The children she conceives keep dying. And every death makes her mental state worse. And at last, grief tips her over into delusion—she turns her suffering on Chesa, tells herself he has been the one killing their babies all along.”
Clang.
Hyderlin drove the poker into its stand with more force than intended. Sarg fell silent. She turned on him, sharp-voiced:
“It sounds like the one who’s lost their mind is you—not Margarite. Before you go draping her in your half-formed theories, I’d suggest you check on the state of your own reasoning first. Where are your manners?”
“If I’d ever had manners and good sense, I wouldn’t have quit the Holy Knights and bought a house next to your fake grave.”
Sarg sank back into the armchair and took a long pull of wine. His legs were stretched out without ceremony—graceless, careless. But the hand around the glass, the composed set of his expression, and the precision of every syllable he spoke were something else entirely, something that no amount of deliberate looseness could quite undo. Aristocratic—regardless of how hard he tried to be otherwise.
The incoherence of it. Low and high at once.
He opened his lips—still wine-dampened, still clean and measured in their movement.
“The truth is, it isn’t entirely without basis. You saw what happened at the table tonight.”
Hyderlin pressed her mouth shut.
In a room full of sound—cutlery and voices—Margarite had been the only one to hear a baby crying. An auditory hallucination. And Chesa had shown no surprise at all, as if it were nothing new.
Hyderlin could feel her thinking tilting toward Sarg’s theory—and she pushed back against it. She was not ready to accept something she wasn’t certain of.
Sarg spoke in the voice of someone whose autumn has come too soon—dry and melancholy:
“I have seen the early signs of this in her for a very long time. Perhaps what we are seeing now is a worsening of what was always there.”
“Early signs of what? What are you talking about?”
Sarg looked into his empty cup and retraced the years. The time before Margarite was called a saint. The time before he was called the Radiant Knight. Everything that came between.
He refilled his cup.
“I don’t have the right to speak of things Margarite hasn’t chosen to share. If you want to know, ask her yourself.”
They had been given one room.
The palace had apparently meant it as a thoughtful gesture toward a married couple with a child. For the two of them, it was merely awkward.
“You take the bed.”
Sarg said it and stretched himself out on the chaise longue. Hyderlin waited until she was certain he was asleep.
The night was quiet. Only the sound of autumn insects against the window disturbed the stillness. In silence, every sound was enormous. Hyderlin rose without making a sound, pulled on her shoes and her outer coat.
She needed no lantern. She walked out into the dark corridor. The wall sconces gave out a faint, shifting light—just enough to see by.
There may be small things that have changed in four years. The patrol routes. The angles of visibility. Small things cause accidents. It is worth checking.
She moved with soundless steps through the familiar passage and pressed herself into the unlighted corners to watch the guards. She observed for a long time.
Nothing much had changed in the watch schedule since her death. Every figure moved at the right hour, on the right path, exactly as she remembered.
Hyderlin moved on. Her next destination was what had once been her own room—directly beside Chesa’s.
The door to the king’s bedchamber had no one standing guard before it.
Careless.
She tried the handle of her old room. It didn’t move. The door was bolted from the outside with a lock—clearly not in use, sealed like a room put to rest.
She moved a little along the wall to stand before the king’s door. She pressed her ear to it and listened. What reached her was faint—something like voices, indistinct.
She moved upward—to the floor above her room—and tried the door at the equivalent position. It opened.
Hyderlin went in, closed it, and crossed directly to the window and threw it open.
Outside, a guard with a torch was making his round. Quite a lot of light. But people rarely looked upward, and if she controlled the noise there was no danger.
She gripped the sill of the fourth-floor window and lowered herself hand-over-hand down the face of the wall, finding the grooves and ledges in the stone, until she had reached the third floor.
She landed on the narrow ledge outside her own old window. The window itself was sealed—a board had been fitted to the inside frame and nailed shut.
Breaking it open would make noise and alert the guards. No chance to wander her old room and sit with the memories, then.
She moved carefully along the face of the wall, sideways. She dropped silently onto the terrace that adjoined Chesa’s bedroom.
The terrace was wider than the glass-paned door it led from. Hyderlin set her back against the wall beside the door and stood still, listening. Voices came through the glass, muffled and unclear.
“No—no, I don’t want to be here. There are too many. Stop looking at me. I said stop looking—! Get back! I have nothing to say to any of you!”
Margarite’s voice—shredded and bright with panic. Chesa’s answered, much lower, harder to catch.
“…There is no one here but the two of us, Margarite. Only us—”
“You’re the worst of them. Go—disappear—go away—”
“…Drink this. It will settle you.”
“Don’t make me laugh. Another one of your—”
“Drink it.”
“Ngh—”
Silence.
Then a soft, heaving sound—like someone crying without breath to cry with.
More silence.
Then the sound of a door opening and closing.
Chesa had left.
Hyderlin opened the glass door and stepped inside.
The royal bedchamber was large and richly appointed. Margarite lay sprawled across the feather mattress like a puppet whose strings had been cut. On the small table beside the bed sat a wine bottle and a gold cup.
Hyderlin leaned down and breathed in the smell of the cup. Then she moved to the door, opened it a crack, and looked down the corridor. The trailing hem of Chesa’s coat disappeared around the corner.
Where could he be going, at this hour, leaving a half-conscious queen behind?
This was meant to be reconnaissance—a careful sweep, nothing more. She had not come here to take risks. But it was very difficult to pretend she hadn’t seen this.
She left sufficient distance between herself and Chesa and followed him.
He walked for a long time with his lantern, visibly avoiding the patrol routes. Which made things easier for Hyderlin, shadowing him in the dark.
“…Who’s there?”
Chesa turned suddenly and looked directly toward where she was standing.
